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Division Spotlight
Education, Training & Workforce Development
The Education, Training & Workforce Development Division provides communication among the academic, industrial, and governmental communities through the exchange of views and information on matters related to education, training and workforce development in nuclear and radiological science, engineering, and technology. Industry leaders, education and training professionals, and interested students work together through Society-sponsored meetings and publications, to enrich their professional development, to educate the general public, and to advance nuclear and radiological science and engineering.
Meeting Spotlight
International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
Bo Shi, Bojan Petrovic
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 172 | Number 2 | October 2012 | Pages 138-150
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE11-19
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The Monte Carlo method is widely used to compute the fundamental eigenfunction and eigenvalue for nuclear systems. However, the standard power iteration method computes only the fundamental eigenmode, while it would be beneficial to also compute the higher eigenfunctions and eigenvalues to support the reactor transient analysis, stability analysis, and assessments of nuclear safety, as well as to enable certain source convergence acceleration techniques. Modifications to the power method have been developed that in principle can accomplish this goal, but they typically lead to unphysical positive and negative particles requiring a procedure to compute the net-weight deposition. In this paper, we present a new mechanism that enables the Monte Carlo procedure, with certain modifications, to compute the second eigenfunction and eigenvalue for one-dimensional (1-D) problems. The method could in principle be extended to higher harmonics and general geometries. The results from numerical examples, including a 1-D, two-group, multiregion example, are consistent with reference results. Moreover, the extra computational cost of this method is of the same order of magnitude as the conventional Monte Carlo simulations. This method can be applied solely to solve for the high eigenmodes, or implemented as a part of a net-weight computation mechanism when negative particles are present in the modified power iteration method.